Update

(OK, so I want to do several things with this, but to dive right now into the meta of all of them is going to work against some of my purpose, so I'll try to come back to that exposition.)

For now, there's an essential point I want to get …

When word came in that John Perry Barlow had died, I thought of some particular comments that have stuck with me, relating his experiences interceding between FBI agents and their hacker quarry, right around the time the Cold War was ending.

I've usually thought of Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown …

I'd already been struggling with how to scope an introduction to the struggle over ZFS licensing and the relative positions of the various players, but this news Friday about open legal battle breaking out between the SFLC and SFC makes this too timely to sit on any further. Suffice to …

I'd been aware of version control for years, in the pre-distributed era of CVS, as SVN started to be a thing. I never used it much other than sometimes to check out code to take a look at it. Usually tarballs were available and there seemed to be little point …

pizza image via OpenClipArt

It's common in free software circles to try to disambiguate which sense of the English word free we mean by saying "think free as in speech not free beer".

Though one can still presumably get free beer from friends (or friends of friends) at parties and …

a phrase for talking about decentralized freedom

Given my long stint doing a lot of sysadmin type work, which saw me working across many machines, often of disparate types, I have tended to customize my environment very lightly.

Doing less of that and more of other things, I've really begun to add some dependencies to my environments …

The advantages of full freedom are not that difficult to recognize and describe. What's tricky is recognizing and characterizing non-free components in a mixed environment, plotting a course away from them, and then navigating that course successfully.

I was heartened to see, for example, the GNU project develop a rubric …

What we share with other people of our own thoughts spans a massive range of possibilities from the very personal to the very public.

At the most personal level roil our wildest dreams, our deepest fears, our greatest hopes. Here then also are our greatest vulnerabilities.

At the other end …

The pets versus cattle comparison evokes a useful distinction. I'm trying to get on board with this trend because I can see at least some of the advantages in terms of overall resilience.

But taken more to heart, the comparison, has less to do about them--the objects of our analysis--and …